Training for rural health care providers

In 2005, during visits to our midwife training graduates, we learned that some of our midwives were acting as general medical practitioners in their villages, because the township clinics where fully-qualified doctors could be found were too far away.  Yet our midwife training program did not cover many areas of rural medical practice that these young women needed to know.   Kham Aid identified three midwives who were most needful of additional training and sent them to Litang county where they enrolled in a ten-month program to learn general health care skills.   With this additional training our midwives were able to expand their skills well beyond midwifery to provide a wide range of treatment and preventative services to their communities; they also qualified for somewhat higher government salaries. 

In 2008, thanks to a private donor, we sent an aspiring young doctor named Tashi Tseren to enroll in the same program in Litang.  He was 20 years old, a junior middle school graduate, and comes from Baituo village, Gawa Township, in Litang.  He was selected because his village has a relatively high population but the nearest clinic is too far away for villagers to easily obtain medical care.  After graduation in December, 2008 he will be assigned to Baituo as a home-based rural health care provider.   Read a letter from Tashi Tseren.

About the training

The class is organized by the Litang County Health Bureau and is receives principal funding from a charity in Taiwan.  Each year the program enrolls about 30 students carefully selected from six counties in southern Ganzi Prefecture.   The students come from remote rural villages where there is no government clinic. 

Each year training begins on March 1 and lasts through December.  There are eight months of classroom training and two months of internship during which the students rotate through several medical facilities in Litang and take part in providing health care to patients under the supervision of experienced physicians.   

The students pay nothing for the course; all costs including food, lodging, books, teacher wages, medicines and equipment, are provided by the program.  The dormitories and classrooms at the Litang facility where training takes place are large and can accommodate more students than there are funds for.  Consequently, the program welcomes additional students sponsored by Kham Aid.